Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [298]
Back in December 1941, when Eden cabled Churchill from Moscow urging the necessity for acceptance of Russia’s demands for recognition of its pre-Barbarossa 1941 frontiers, the prime minister replied: “When you say that ‘nothing we and the US can do or say will affect the situation at the end of the war,’ you are making a very large assumption about the conditions which will then prevail. No one can foresee how the balance of power will lie, or where the winning armies will stand. It seems probable however that the US and the British Empire, far from being exhausted, will be the most powerful armed and economic bloc the world has ever seen, and that the Soviet Union will need our aid for reconstruction far more than we shall need theirs.” By 1945, the frustration of such hopes was plain. The Soviets were vastly stronger, the British much weaker, than Churchill had anticipated. The U.S. commitment to perceived common Anglo-American interests, in Europe or anywhere else, was more tenuous than it had ever been.
In the cold light of day, the prime minister understood this. On May 4 he wrote to Eden, then in San Francisco for the inaugural meeting of the United Nations, about the evolving situation in eastern Europe as he saw it:
I fear terrible things have happened1082 during the Russian advance through Germany to the Elbe. The proposed withdrawal of the United States Army to the occupational lines which were arranged … would mean a tide of Russian domination sweeping forward 120 miles on a front of 200 or 400 miles. This would be an event which, if it occurred, would be one of the most melancholy in history. After it was over and the territory occupied by the Russians, Poland would be completely engulfed and buried deep in Russian-occupied lands … The Russian frontier would run from the North Cape in Norway … across the Baltic to a point just east of Lubeck … half-way across [Austria] to the Izonzo river behind which Tito and Russia will claim everything to the east. Thus the territories under Russian control would include the Baltic Provinces, all of Germany to the occupational line, all Czechoslovakia, a large part of Austria, the whole of Yugoslavia, Hungary, Roumania, Bulgaria, until Greece in her present tottering condition is reached … This constitutes an event in the history of Europe to which there has been no parallel … All these matters can only be settled before the United States Armies in Europe are weakened … It is to this early and speedy showdown and settlement with Russia that we must now turn our hopes. Meanwhile I am against weakening our claim against Russia on behalf of Poland in any way.
The Allies now found themselves in a bewildering and uncharted new world; Roosevelt was gone. Following the vast shock of his death on April 12, Churchill briefly entertained the notion of flying to Washington for the funeral. Finally, he decided that he was needed in London, an outcome that was also probably influenced by personal disinclination. The prime minister’s enthusiasm for the president had waned dramatically. There had been so many slights. Some were relatively trivial, such as a March decision by Washington to halt meat exports to Britain. Some were more serious, such as the imposition of draconian curbs on postwar British civil aviation in accordance with the terms of Lend-Lease. Above all, of course, there was American unilateralism on eastern European issues. Roosevelt’s greatness was not in doubt, least of all in the mind of Churchill. But it had been deployed in the service of the United States, and only incidentally and reluctantly in the interests of the British Empire or even of Europe. “We have moved a long way,”1083 wrote Moran in February, “since Winston, speaking of Roosevelt, said to me in the garden at Marrakesh ‘I love that man.’”
Now, Churchill had to deal with the wholly unknown figure of Harry Truman. In the first weeks of the new president’s tenure, though